Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 3 - Evidence - April 21, 2010
OTTAWA, Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, met this day at 4:23 p.m. to study the accessibility of post-secondary education in Canada.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology. Today, we continue with our study on accessibility of post-secondary education, with the particular theme being on immigrants and visible minorities.
Let me introduce our three witnesses. Robert Sweet is Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University. His research interests include home-school connections, school-work transitions, school engagement and immigrant student integration. He has published extensively on post-secondary education in general and on the experience of immigrants in particular.
Teresa Abada is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Her current research interests focus on selected aspects of the experiences of children and youth, including the integration experiences of children of immigrants. Currently, she is investigating the social, cultural and human capital factors that shape the children of immigrants' economic and social integration. She has published several articles on the educational attainment of immigrant youth, including ethnic differences in educational attainment among children of Canadian immigrants.
Miles Corak, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, is no stranger to our committee. He has been here before; he helped us in our poverty, housing and homelessness study. He has published numerous articles on topics dealing with child poverty, access to university education, intergenerational earnings, education mobility and unemployment. His most recent research deals with the definition of poverty, with child poverty in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, and with the socio-economic status of immigrants and children of immigrants.
Thank you to all three of you, and welcome. I will start with Professor Sweet. If the three of you could take about seven minutes each, that would be great.
Robert Sweet, Professor Emeritus, Lakehead University, as an individual: I will refer to three studies and make three broad points. I will highlight them at this point, and presumably we will get to more detail when we talk about them.
I assume you have the handout that I sent. This frames the discussion of the three issues of access that I would like to address within a life course framework, from which we take the post-secondary segment and bracket it by the two transitions of access and graduation.
When we look at the first transition, I would like to talk a little about the first study that we have recently completed. In the Toronto District School Board, TDSB, with the immigrant students, we are looking at the variability in not necessarily the post-secondary pathways that they follow, but the post-high school pathways. Many of them do not go to university or to college, and it is as interesting — or maybe even more interesting — to find out what the antecedents and correlates of those two pathways are, dropout and simply graduation.
The next study, looking at adults, has to do with the role of Canadian post-secondary credentials in the settlement process of highly educated recent immigrants, using the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, LSIC.
The third study has to do with immigrant parents' investments in their children's post-secondary education. There we are talking about savings as the basic strategy, and the use of instruments such as Registered Educational Savings Plans, RESPs. The issue is how savings is framed within a broader parental investment strategy, which in the popular press is referred to as ``intensive parenting.'' I will talk a little about that.
In the first study, immigrant youth and post-high school pathways, the first thing to note is the importance of disaggregating the immigrant category. Many of the studies we have to refer to make a comparison between immigrants and non-immigrants. Typically, we find no differences exist between the two. On average, their academic engagement and achievement are pretty much the same, but it masks real variability within the immigrant groups.
We try to tease these out by looking at two dimensions. One is immigrant generation — first, second and third immigrant generation — and the second is region of origin. We begin to look at some of the cultural dimensions and distinctions among immigrant families.
I have laid out a little table that will give you some notion of the variability in the pathways that kids of these different groups follow. You can see that there are real differences — for example, Caribbean and East Asian. There, the comparison is not really one of preference because we are looking at dropout and university participation; it is really a question of performance, which raises the next important question.
When we begin to look at the basis for these distinctions, they go back a long way. They go back to the early years of school. In fact, when we look at programs such as the Human Early Learning Partnership, HELP, on the West Coast, we are looking at antecedents that are really involved not in preschool but in infancy. Therefore, you get studies and evidence now of the long-term effects between investments in early-education programs and infant-education programs. You begin to see this, in this data, with the importance of the at-risk category to post-secondary pathways and the selection to post-secondary.
The at-risk indicator is the cumulative index of school engagement and achievement at entry to middle school or junior high school. It tells us that much of the story has really been told and is over in the elementary school. That is reinforced by policies of tracking or streaming, which are based almost exclusively on performance, not on preference and not on interest in vocational work or anything such as that.
One of the issues that that raises has to do with the business of vulnerability. A rich and interesting literature begins to point to some interventions and solutions to this business of a deterministic view of who goes to university and college.
I have totally lost track of time, but I can stop there or go on to the second one.
The Chair: You have another minute or two.
Mr. Sweet: Perhaps we will skip then to the third study because it is more closely related to the young child. This is immigrant family savings for children's post-secondary education. In this study, we were using a national survey, the Survey of Approaches to Educational Planning, the 2002 iteration of that information or data or survey.
We were interested in the strategies that immigrant parents employ to finance their education. If you have been looking, and I understand you have, at Canada Student Loans and that area, you probably know as much as one needs to from this particular study. The Canadian financial support system is primarily a loans system. It is primarily student-centred. It is increasingly moving, though, to a different weighting involving parents. You can see that with the tax credit notions and the Canada Education Savings Grant, CESG, program, which involves parents and assumes a parental responsibility for financing children's post-secondary education.
One of the really important issues in looking at savings is to view it as embedded in this broader strategy of parenting. The parents invest in many different ways. Childhood vulnerability is importantly related to the amount and quality of time that parents, mostly mothers, have to invest in the growth and development of their young children. The major finding to come out of the early development studies that Keating and these people are doing and the HELP program, the research consortium in Vancouver, has centred around the home employment balance and the difficulties women have in finding enough time to invest in their kids.
I will conclude with a quick run around the business of investment. Most of the analysis of this issue of parental investment has to do with asking the question of whether it is a function of wealth or a function of culture. There they are referring to cultural capital. The evidence that we have here is that the answer is no, or if you like, a tentative answer is no, it is not. In fact, as you can see from the top row of the table, that argument that culture trumps income, that cultural capital is more important than income, works only for the reference group, which is the native population. It does not work with the immigrant groups. It is overwhelmed or overtaken by the high levels of post-secondary aspirations amongst the parents and the fact that probably in setting this question, we pay far too much attention to highbrow culture. Many things that parents do, particularly mothers, in investing in their kids' early schooling and socializing them to the role of student do not require high levels of parental education or access to so-called highbrow culture.
Many other issues and questions emerge from this, but I will stop at this point.
The Chair: We can get more into them as we get into questions and dialogue with the members.
Teresa Abada, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, as an individual: I would like to focus on a study that examines the ethnic differences in university completion rates among the children of immigrants. We are referring to a group of kids who came here at a young age, before age 12, as well as those who were born in Canada but whose parents were born in a foreign country or immigrants. The premise is that they would have been exposed to the same values and at least opportunities as kids of native-born parents. To that end, we examined to what extent there are ethnic differences in university completion rates, what accounts for these group variations and how the kids are doing relative to their parents.
In terms of accounting for these group variations, is it the parents' levels of education? Is it different forms of social capital, such as having a strong sense of belonging to one's ethnic group, or having a greater network of ethnic friends or even having feelings of exclusion while growing up in Canada because of one's race or ethnicity? All of this can either facilitate or hinder the pursuit of higher education.
One has to keep in mind the different circumstances of the settlement experiences of each of these groups that set them apart from other groups. Some, for example, may come with high levels of financial capital and can buy into a middle-class neighbourhood and then be exposed to good schools and good neighbourhoods. That is quite different from someone who may settle in a low-income neighbourhood or whose parents' generation may be stuck in low-skilled, low-waged jobs. We have to keep in mind the settlement experiences of the parental generation and how these advantages or disadvantages are transmitted to the subsequent generation.
Table 1 is a study using the Ethnic Diversity Survey that allows us to examine a wide range of social capital factors. Well over 90 per cent, for example, have graduated from high school. However, when we look at these university completion rates, we see a wide range in group variations, ranging from about 21 per cent among the Dutch second generation to well over almost 60 per cent among the Chinese. When we look at the intergenerational mobility here, we can see that most kids achieve upward mobility across generations in the sense that they have been able to exceed their fathers' levels of education. We can see a substantial margin among the Portuguese and Italian youth. We can see that twice as many Polish and Chinese second generations achieve a university degree relative to their parents. We see that most groups do achieve upward mobility, but some also show signs of stagnation. We see that, for example, among the Blacks and the Filipinos. In fact, they are also the only two groups that do not exceed their fathers' levels of education.
What accounts for some of these differences? When you take into account these group variations in family background characteristics, we find that parents' education, especially fathers' education, was an important predictor, as was the social capital factor, such as family structure, growing up in a two-parent household. Studies show that having close parental supervision can be beneficial for university completion. Certain studies in the U.S. have also shown that.
We find that the family background characteristics do account for some of the disadvantages amongst some of the European groups. In particular, we found that parents' level of education was the most important factor that explains the lower university completion rates among Italian and Portuguese immigrant youth. That is not surprising as we have a lower proportion, especially among Portuguese immigrants, in management and professional occupations. Here, we are looking again at the economic integration of the parental generation.
We also found that Asians, except for Filipinos, also have higher university completion rates in comparison to European groups. What accounts for this, we could not explain, but some of the social capital factors, as I mentioned earlier, tend to increase university completion rates among visible minority youth. However, ethnic capital, as measured by the lower, average earnings of the father's generation, tends to reduce the university completion rate among visible minorities. Also, there is a larger concentration of the father's generation, within the visible minority, in the larger metropolitan areas that tends to be an advantage for them as well.
Going back to the point about some groups, once you account for these group variations, we found that Blacks and Filipinos are at a disadvantage when you compare them to the British reference group. Certainly among Filipinos, it is striking that the immigrant parents are among the most educated of all the immigrant groups yet their kids do not achieve the same level of education as the parents. This raises a question. A study by Philip Kelly says that Filipinos are the most segmented immigrant group in Canada. They tend to be stuck in lower-skilled, low-wage jobs, such as the hotel industry, service industry and health care. This leads to the question of the extent of the devaluation of the parents' foreign credentials and how this disadvantage might be transmitted to the next generation. We did not look at that in the study, but it does bring to light those questions.
We also found that second generation Blacks remain at the bottom for university completion rates. To some extent, we found that ethnic capital tends to contribute to that disadvantage, although we could not explain that disadvantage in its entirety. We need to examine these certain communities further to understand some of the disadvantages, obstacles or challenges that these kids might face early on in their schooling. For example, if the parents' generation has lower rates of return to schooling, how is that disadvantage transmitted to the next generation? It raises many such questions.
As I mentioned earlier on the settlement experience of the parents' generation, we found that the rural residence of the father's generation is the most important factor that explains the lower university completion rates among the second generation. We need to consider that the earlier immigrants perhaps were recruited for their agricultural skills, and they established farmlands in Ontario and out West. The second generation would have benefited from these viable agricultural enterprises, which might have reduced the demand for university completion.
Returning to the educational advantage among other visible minority groups, in particular among the Chinese, we need to look further at the roles of ethnic social institutions. We could not determine this from the study. However, past studies show that the Chinese communities tend to be more organized in their social structures, such as ethnic language schools, and that the role of some of these social institutions facilitate these types of formal networks of support for the children of immigrants. At least, they help them to overcome some of the disadvantages or deficiencies that they might face in their school years.
Miles Corak, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa: Thank you. I am pleased to be here today. I would like to use my seven minutes perhaps to leave you with just two facts and a couple of cautions. I believe the clerk of the committee has given you a couple of figures from some of my research.
The first fact is that we should take time now and again to celebrate our accomplishments. With respect to immigrant integration and immigrant education, Canada stands out positively in the OECD. In figure 1, the figure along the vertical axis indicates the educational attainment of a group of citizens by birth in years of schooling. Thus, 12 years would approximate a high-school education. Along the horizontal axis, the figure indicates the educational attainment of their parents, who were not born in this country. We are talking about immigrants versus second- generation Canadians.
I have also put a couple of dotted lines on the graph. The horizontal dotted line indicates the average education level of Canadians with Canadian-born parents. The vertical dotted line indicates the previous generation. All the squares represent the average educational attainment for different countries of origin. For example, if the father came from Portugal, on average that particular cohort of Portuguese had fewer than seven and a half years of education. Their Canadian-born sons went on to attain about 14 years of schooling. The fact that all of these squares are above that horizontal dotted line means that all these second-generation Canadians have more education than the average Canadian with Canadian-born parents. The second generation are a relatively advantaged group in our society in terms of education.
The other thing to notice is that all of these squares are concentrated in the upper right-hand corner, which means that their parents came with above-average education. People with above-average education, whether Canadian-born or other, have a good ability to pass higher education on to their children. That is no less true for these immigrant communities.
We are selecting a group of individuals who are relatively well educated. When they come to this country, they have children who go on to be relatively well educated. On average, this is a success story. It has something to do with the type of people that come here, their attitudes, their values and their aspirations. It also has something to do with the institutions that they encounter, in particular the education systems at the primary and secondary levels, which should be applauded. When you make these comparisons across OECD countries, you find that Canada sticks out as one of the leaders. All that said, some groups we should worry about. There is a good deal of diversity under these numbers, and I will touch on those in conclusion.
The second fact that I want to leave with you is highlighted in figure 3. Here, we are talking about a different group of people who are at the other extreme. These people come to this country as child immigrants who face a slightly different situation than the group we were just talking about.
The horizontal axis indicates their ages when they arrived in the country. It extends from 0-17 years of age. The vertical axis indicates the chances of being a high-school dropout. If you look at the left panel for men, it shows that if they came to Canada before the age of 9 years, the chances that they will not obtain a high-school diploma are about 15 per cent. That is roughly the Canadian average. Interestingly enough, it does not seem to matter at what age you came in those early years. Whether the child came as a newborn, as a five-year old, or as a nine-year old, the probability of not getting a high school degree is about the same.
A distinct change occurs in that relationship. In the technical literature, we refer to this pattern as a hockey stick. The chances of being a high-school dropout increase incrementally with each age of arrival past about 10 years. There is a distinct change in risks after this point.
That also applies to women, although the levels are different. You see a distinct pattern. It would be interesting to know the reasons behind this. We can talk about that in detail later.
In conclusion, I want to echo what the two previous speakers implied in their subtext. From my reading of the academic literature, the factors that determine access to post-secondary schooling are less monetary and much more non-monetary with respect to the chance that someone who is 17 or 18 years old will go on to university given the current configuration of our support to students. It is all the things that get you to that age in which you can legitimately make a choice. You have made it through high school and instilled in you are the aspirations and the motivation to go on. Given the current situation in financial support, those are the important factors that drive access.
I will leave it at that. We can explore this more later if you wish.
The Chair: Thank you to all three witnesses.
The Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario, CFS, released a report recently by the Task Force on Campus Racism. Much of it deals with incidents occurring on campus by people already registered within educational institutions. Our focus, however, is access to post-secondary education. If this is a hindrance to people staying in post- secondary education, it would be interesting to hear your comments on that.
The main aspect of their recommendations and thoughts on access comes out in a statement that they make in the report. As identified in this report, financial barriers to post-secondary education affect racialized students in a disproportionate way. The high fees and high debt model of post-secondary education in Ontario is discriminatory because racialized students are less likely to afford the upfront cost of tuition fees and will often find themselves paying more than their non-racialized counterparts for the same education through compound interest on student loans.
I want your comment on whether you agree with that statement, and what your general thoughts are on this report with respect to that matter.
Given the government divisions within our country constitutionally, what do you think the federal government can do to help immigrants and visible minority youth to access post-secondary education?
Mr. Corak: I have not read that study, so I am not familiar with it.
As I said in discussing some of my findings, there is a great deal of diversity in situations. Some ethnic groups succeed quite remarkably. Ms. Abada has talked about those. Others have more challenges. According to my findings, all of these groups tend to have higher education than their Canadian counterparts. At a first and broad brush stroke, I do not see financial issues at the core of that.
It is an issue of what happens in the labour market after they graduate. Some groups may have difficult and discriminatory experiences in the labour market. You can imagine them calculating that if their earnings are to be less than average and the return on education is not there for them, then why should they go? I could see that factor occurring. However, I do not see financial issues driving access.
On the question of what the federal government can do, I have two points. The first has been alluded to in that the family is crucial. An individual's starting point in life is important. The federal government's support to low-income families contributes to this. The work-life balance that Mr. Sweet discussed is an important aspect that helps all Canadians and, in particular, immigrants.
We should also realize that immigration policy is also social and education policy. We make decisions with respect to immigration and selection rules. That will impact provinces and, over the medium to long term, the education system.
I am somewhat worried by the focus on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, for example. We talked about the importance of the family. It will be interesting to see how this large number of temporary workers begins to fit into our society and how this program actually functions.
We have invited people to Canada temporarily and presumably taken them away from their families. A mother is no longer nurturing her children; she may be nurturing someone else's children in Canada, for example. That breaks up the important family capital. If these temporary workers eventually become permanent residents in Canada — as some have in the past — they will then sponsor their families, and their children will have a much rougher ride as a result.
You see echoes of that in some of these data from previous attempts, such as with some Jamaican immigrants. The children had a much rougher time when those families were broken up. Policies can inadvertently have effects we did not intend over the medium to longer term.
I encourage you to think hard about the long-term implications of selection rules. I hinted at that with my second figure. When people come in, it changes the risk pattern for graduating from high school. You need to address or offer supports in different ways, depending upon the mix of immigrant children.
The Chair: That was helpful.
Ms. Abada: Can you repeat the statement made in that study?
The Chair: You have all talked about whether parents — the father or the mother — had post-secondary education and cultural aspects as an influence in children continuing their education. This CFS report says that financial barriers to post-secondary education affect racialized students in a disproportionate way. The high fees and high debt model of post- secondary education in Ontario is discriminatory because racialized students are less likely to afford the upfront cost of tuition fees and loan debt. I think I read in this document that there are difficulties with family income, supports from the family and their ability to get jobs if they suffer from discrimination.
Do you agree with that, or is there something we should look at further?
Ms. Abada: I did not read the study, but I would like to comment on the issue.
When immigrants come to Canada, they have high aspirations for their children. This was also echoed by Mr. Corak.
You can have all the aspirations and optimism, but if you cannot afford it — if you have to work to help contribute to the family — that can have an impact on how you do in your academic work.
You raised the point about racialized students not being able to afford post-secondary education. There might be something to this. For example, one can look at it in terms of their performance in their university courses. Do the students stop at the undergraduate level? Who are the ones more likely to go on to do a masters or to other professional schools? How do they do in their academic work?
One can look further at who is more likely to work 20, 25 or even 30 hours per week. If you look, for example, at their part-time work patterns, and you do find that visible minority students or racialized students work more hours, that might tell you a story — I do not know.
There is also the notion about the family; for example, among immigrant communities, growing up in two-parent households really facilitates the pursuit of a university education. The point Mr. Corak was making about the temporary worker program, what happens then is the breakdown of the family unit temporarily; so when the kids do come, you have a reunification of strangers rather than family members. Often, in that instance, you tend to question the parent's authority.
For example, many of these kids would have been raised by extended family members back home. When they come here, this conflict happens between parents and children, which might affect their academic work. I think that is something to be considered.
Mr. Sweet: Perhaps I can start with your second question and work backward. I did some work with the LSIC. These are recent adult immigrants — in fact, the group that came in 2000.
One of the areas that we started to look at — and we are about to do an analysis in greater depth — concerns the role of women and education in the labour market, perhaps talking about what the government can do in relation to a particular problem. Among immigrants, the issue may be more one of gender than race at that point. Obviously they intersect, but to look at race in the absence of gender, considering the family as a unit, is probably not the best definition.
The other aspect concerns the role of language in allowing women to access education and training so that they can make their way into the labour market. That is a significant barrier, given the information we have now. It is also supported by many qualitative studies. On that notion of intersectionality, the feminist literature has certainly addressed it as qualitative.
The other aspect about what the federal government can do is not look exclusively at post-secondary access, but go back to the other end and look at support for families. What form would that support take? We have pretty strong evidence now that one is embedded in the other, given the large body of work in the United States and also work in Canada on the second- and third-generation research on the old nature versus nurture debate. Much of our intellectual potential, which is what we appear to be so interested in within our schools — and which is the basis for many of our expectations and predictions, whether we are parents or teachers — is a function of socialization and social conditions.
We have summaries of research, for example, entitled ``From Network to Neighbourhood.'' I do not know if you are familiar with that work, but it is being developed in Canada. It goes back to the work of J.D. Willms on vulnerable children in Canada and his notion of the socioeconomic gradient and socioeconomic status, SES, and the work that Keating and other people are doing subsequent to that. The evidence is there, and I think the policy response really does have to do with support to young families, with a focus on the mother because the roles are quite different for mother and father in relation to socializing the child.
On your first question about the CFS, their argument in relation to the racial dimension of the loans system — principally the loans system, but the needs-based grant system as well — is probably an extension of their earlier critique of income, or an SES argument that we are directing Canada Student Loans monies to people who do not need it and not getting enough to those who do.
Ross Finnie made the best critique of that in his call for a new architecture for the Canada Student Loans Program: Fairness to low-income people moves grants in offsetting monies up front instead of feeding it to pay off existing debt. If it is a social position as much as a racial category, then functions that fit you at a certain level of social address may be the most effective way to address that. Mr. Finnie has some suggestions.
Senator Callbeck: Thank you for coming today and for your presentations. I have some questions on those presentations. First, Mr. Sweet, you did not discuss all of your second study because of time limits. When I look at that chart, it is talking about a sample of immigrants who had source-country university degrees. However, when I read the description of the largest, the 54 per cent, it says, ``No formal education.''
Mr. Sweet: That is my mistake. What I meant there was what type of educational activity they engage in after coming to Canada. It is not a description of their current educational credentials. Many of them — the non- participants — do engage in education, but it is not driven by a need to rebuild or augment or supplement their existing credentials. Most of them presented their credentials, negotiated it in the labour market and are happy with their position. They are engaging in informal, continuing education and non-formal, much as the rest of the workforce is.
Senator Callbeck: Many of them have presented their credentials and are not happy.
Mr. Sweet: When you look at the LSIC, which goes over four years, you see that just about everyone gets a job by wave two. Shortly after they come here, they are employed, but they are not happy with the jobs they have. There is a mismatch with how they feel their credentials should be employed.
However, they are in the labour market, and many of them gain access not through the post-secondary education system but employer-supported training and the ways that one can move forward in a career path in the labour market. The ones who do opt for university or college in this sample tend to be those who were not successful in getting a foothold so that there can be a career ladder, or they are blocked in some way.
Senator Callbeck: I have talked to many taxi drivers, for example, who are very unhappy with the job that they have. Their credentials from their home country were not accepted, for one reason or another. I talked to someone the other day who had returned to college for two years, expecting to get a job and still cannot get one. He is an engineer. Is there anything more we can be doing for these people?
Mr. Sweet: I do not know. The literature has some thoughts on it. One argument is that it is not a problem uniquely of immigrants but that the problem is with our economy and that we under-employ just about everyone. You see some of that evidence from the results of the National Graduates Survey. It is David Livingston's argument that we do not make use of the skill level that we are able to generate in the country.
The Chair: Does anyone else from the panel want to tackle that question?
Mr. Corak: I would draw your attention to a study by a University of British Columbia economist, Philip Oreopoulos. He did an audit study in which he had his research assistants apply for jobs with a series of fake resumés. He sent out hundreds of these resumés, and all he did was change the sound of the last name or the origin of the last name. He did several experiments of this sort. He also changed where the education was received, whether in Canada or Mumbai, and then they tracked the number of call backs they received for interviews. It was clear from their study — and this has been corroborated with Swedish and German studies — that these details send a signal. It is quite clear that your first step in the door is much easier if your name sounds right or if your education was received from an institution with which the employer was familiar. On the one hand, this could be overt discrimination, or it could be a network and information problem. It is also clear that these types of problems will be more severe when the economy is functioning at less than optimum for employment.
Also, in particular sectors, clear barriers exist. You mentioned engineering. I do understand that the federal government is involved in negotiations with these sectors, but clearly education in medicine requires interventions and the setting of standards. If it is an information signalling problem, then it is clear to rank international universities according to the knowledge that they give. That information should be clear. My understanding is that we are moving in that direction, but perhaps not fast enough. If it is information, the federal government can play more of a role in providing that information, offering a network for many of these people. Specific barriers can exist in some occupations that have to be negotiated down. Frankly, sometimes employers are doing things that we would call discriminatory.
Ms. Abada: A study was also done in France on segmented assimilation, specifically on the children of immigrants as well. They found that those who have foreign last names also faced disadvantages in the labour market. Some of them are even third generation. However, those who have, for example, West Asian last names experienced disadvantages as well in the labour market, despite the fact that they were born there or their parents were actually born in France. I do not know to what extent that may or may not play out here.
Mr. Sweet: I have a couple of thoughts about discrimination and hiring. The Oreopoulos study is interesting. It might be read in relation to the traditional historical work on social distance theory. That would mean that one would want to discount the effects because they operate not only on skin colour but also on height and gender. If they are not available, as human beings, we will find something else with ever-finer distinctions to mark differences amongst ourselves in hiring. The underlying dimension of it all is familiarity. It is a type of mechanism, perhaps, that is fairly general.
The other notion is that if we look at hiring and successful labour market entry, historically, the highly educated immigrants — and perhaps Mr. Corak would know more about this than I — were quite successful in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the reasons given for a decline in take-up in employment and in income is competition. The penny finally dropped among the native-born students, and they thought, ``Gee, I better go to school.'' They did, so now you have the native- born with much higher levels of skill than they had before.
The other more focused thought, perhaps, concerns language. When you look in the LSIC, which spans a four-year period, when self-assessed language skills improve, the relationship to the labour market changes dramatically. It will change for other reasons, too, but self-assessed language is pretty important in the change in that four-year period.
Senator Merchant: Welcome. I want to tell you something about my own story. I was born in Greece. I came to Canada just as I finished elementary school in Greece, which goes up to grade 6. My own experience corresponds with what you have said, and you have already answered some of my questions. We moved to Western Canada. We went to Saskatchewan because we had some family there, so some support for us was there already. It was a very small Greek community in Regina as compared to Toronto. The Greek community was a close community.
When we immigrated, one of the special things was that we came as a family. My mother and father came here with their five children, along with many other people from the same area in Greece. Most of people who came to Regina at the same time in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not much older than I was. Some of them might have been 17 or 18 years old. They came without their families to work. Those young people did not have the same advantages that I had, even though I was just a few years younger, because I had my family to support me.
I went to school. There was no possibility that I would go out to work. Most Greeks were in the service industry because they did not speak the language when they came here, but working in a restaurant was possible for them. Someone told my mother that I should sell ice cream or do other work in the restaurant. My mother told them that we came to Canada so that I could go to school. It was a great advantage for me to have such family support.
The community was small and homogeneous, and life centred around the Greek Orthodox Church. This is an advantage, but it also applies certain pressures because everyone knew what was happening and what you were doing. You felt that you had to succeed because you had to please more than just your parents. Other eyes were upon you, so that helped as well.
You touched on foreign names. When we went to school, grade 7 for me, I had a kind teacher, and I spoke hardly any English. I had taken some English lessons in Greece, but I did not speak much at all, and they cut our names down to anglicize them. This was a common pattern. We did not have the names that you mentioned a few moments ago. My name was Panayiota but my teacher said that I would be called Pana. My brother, who was Constantine, was told that he would be called Stan. Automatically, we were saved from having names that sounded foreign. I do not know whether that was a help to me, but I have never looked upon that as malevolent. That was the way life turned out for me. I had that family support. Both my parents had to work, but they were very supportive of us. As well, the community was supportive, and you have touched on that.
One observation was that some of the groups that you have shown on your chart speak English when they arrive here. They have come from countries where English is the spoken language. Is there a great difference in what happens to the children of immigrants based on the language spoken by the parents when they first arrive? Do you have comparisons between English-speaking immigrants versus non-English-speaking immigrants?
You touched on gender, Professor Sweet, but do you have any studies that show differences between what happens to female immigrant students versus male immigrant students?
Mr. Sweet: Certainly, if you come to Ontario or British Columbia speaking English or to Quebec speaking French, it is an advantage. However, it does not seem to hold entirely, and you see that in the Toronto District School Board with English-speaking Caribbean students. Their region of origin and the cultural differences seem to offset what we perceive as a linguistic advantage. This is a real cautionary tale as we get excited about the role of ESL — English as a second language — in language because it is clearly a necessary investment and probably not done early enough or extensively enough, or maintained long enough.
Language becomes a difficulty amongst middle-school students and high-school students because they opt out of ESL. The data in British Columbia show that when they leave, their school marks drop. They leave ESL for very interesting reasons, and, depending on the ethnic group, it is often parental pressure. Parents do not want their sons and daughters in the ESL program because they think it is a waste of time. They want them in the core subject classes such as math and science because they want to get on and begin to build up the curriculum pattern needed for university.
I do have some information on gender that follows the basic debate amongst native-born about boys' underachievement, which is really girls' overachievement, although one cannot truly overachieve. My colleagues, I think, would have more information on gender than I do.
Ms. Abada: I want to comment on your experience growing up in Saskatchewan and about ethnic homogenous communities. That same pattern is observed among certain Vietnamese communities. A study was done in New Orleans that showed a tightly knit community was characterized as having a greater sense of solidarity and an ability to maintain a certain level of expectation of and vigilance over community members.
I wrote a paper on the gender differences in educational attainment among the children of immigrants using the Ethnic Diversity Survey, EDS. We found some differences exist in the sense that some of the social capital, such as family structure and growing up in a two-parent family, played a more important role for women than for men. That is also in line with a similar study in the U.S. The female second generation seem closer to their families, so the parents are able to keep a watchful eye on them and are able to maintain greater supervision over them, which is why they succeed academically. The U.S. study produced the same results.
We also found that second-generation women, who experience exclusion while growing up in Canada because of their race, ethnicity or religion, were more likely to pursue a university education, whereas for men, it was not significant and moved them in a negative direction. There is something about that sense of exclusion growing up in Canada that facilitates the pursuit of higher education.
Mr. Corak: I appreciate your story, senator, and I am sure it has been played out many times in many different communities in Canada, including my own. To speak to the differences by language, that was the major hypothesis that we wanted to pursue in this study and whether this pattern of an increasing risk after a certain age has to do with language acquisition. Psychologists will talk about it being much easier to learn a new language at a younger age than at an older age. The ability to learn a second language is associated with the onset of puberty, being somewhat more challenging afterward.
We categorized these data by language and country of origin. In fact, you do not see this pattern for people coming from English speaking countries such as the U.S. or the U.K., or the rest of the world for that matter, rich or poor. These patterns are distinct to communities in which there is a challenge to learn the new language. If that starts happening early in life, there is no problem.
It would seem, from these statistics, that you were on the cusp of that; and language is part of that. Many things happen in children's lives in the teenage years that change risks.
On girls versus boys, I reiterate again that one of the great success stories has happened to second-generation women. The most educated groups in our society are second-generation women whose parents came from an East Asian background. They are more educated than anyone. The majority of the most recent cohort has a university degree.
On the other hand, the real challenge is with boys. The children that do not make progress tend to be Black males from the Caribbean. That is not only in education. Even if they make it through the education system, it is when they hit the labour market that trouble occurs. Solving an access problem will not solve the longer-term problem if the labour market does not function in a non-discriminatory way.
Senator Martin: I find this session very interesting because much of what you talk about speaks to me from my own experience. I want to test some of my observations over the years growing up in Vancouver as a young immigrant. I was born in Korea, and we moved to Canada when I was seven years old.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend who was a francophone living in British Columbia. He indicated that he does not stand out until he opens his mouth. He speaks with a French accent. People then ask him if he is from Quebec or France. I stand out if I stay silent. However, as soon as I start speaking, people realize I must have been born in Canada. We compared this difference in the way people perceive us based on what they hear and see. We are visible minorities because we wear it on the exterior.
In terms of gender difference, there seems to be two groupings in the charts and statistics you provided: visible minorities or immigrants that clearly have barriers to access post-secondary education; then the vast majority of immigrants for whom the issue is not about accessing post-secondary education, but accessing the labour market. It is less about overachievement or underachievement.
Based on my observations of men from my cultural community, they work as hard, but they say — including my own brother — societal norms or societal tolerance varies. Visible minority women experience less discrimination than men. I have watched some of the men that I have grown up with struggle with greater discrimination.
Do you agree with that? What were your observations from your studies on gender difference?
Ms. Abada: We did not look at gender differences in labour market outcomes. A Statistics Canada study — I cannot remember the author's name — looks at earnings of second-generation females; they tend to be higher.
Going back to what Mr. Corak said, you are correct that second-generation females have high levels of educational attainment, particularly those of Asian background. Whether and how that translates to the labour market in being more accepted, literature indicates that immigrant females have greater acculturation rates than males perhaps. I do not know what those factors may be; I would have to examine it in relation to labour market outcomes.
On discrimination, I agree with you, but I have not looked at it systematically.
Senator Martin: My mother used to say that she thought it was because many women from different countries have a lesser voice in a culture that is more patriarchal. Although men and women are both educated, opportunities for women are less. When they come to Canada, women suddenly gain more opportunities whereas men are losing ground. My mother and other women talk about finding their voice in Canada.
That is simply an interesting observation to share with you.
Ms. Abada: You may be correct that growing up in a patriarchal household may lead you to be an overachiever. It may be a way to prevent social reproduction of culture and, perhaps, to escape some of these cultural norms.
Mr. Sweet: I think the notion of immigrant girls going to schools in Canada and finding opportunities for expression are much greater. ESL teachers are very familiar with this at all levels of school from elementary through secondary.
One explanation — it is probably quite speculative — for why women have a warmer reception in the labour market than men is about sexual roles. Masculinity is defined by culture. A woman may wear a sari, which is more easily accommodated in an office than perhaps a turban or a beard. These gender or sex markers move outside of the culture; they can become more difficult for men than women.
The other argument has to do with preferences. One of our groups in Vancouver, Marie Adamuti-Trache and Lesley Andres, has done a study on women's choices of field of study. The article is entitled ``You've come a long way, baby?'' and appears in a recent issue of Canadian Public Policy. Women continue to opt toward the non-sciences, social sciences, humanities and fine arts. The only counterevidence we have was work we did earlier in which immigrant girls had much greater strength in mathematics and tended to go into engineering and such more than native-born women.
The interesting gender notion, gender and ethnicity, perhaps goes back to your question as well. It is part of this, when Ms. Abada said that girls are more easily acculturated.
If you go back and look at compliance, it is important to do your homework in school. Homework has a positive effect on achievement under certain conditions at certain levels, particularly high school; and girls put an inordinate amount of time into science homework.
We did a study using the School Achievement Indicators Program, SAIP, science data; and they are rewarded by their teachers. They get As and A-pluses in their assignments in science. Then they write the SAIP objective tests, and the boys do way better than they do. That is just not fair; how can that happen? It is because they lead different lives outside the school; their leisure activities are embedded in contexts and situations that promote quantitative reasoning that benefits them.
Gender is really complicated. It interacts with the curriculum in the school, and it interacts with hiring practices in the labour market. It is pretty hard to pin it down.
Senator Martin: I will ask the question and maybe have just one panellist answer. With visible minorities in cities versus outside of cities where they may be more isolated, I have had parents ask whether their child would be more successful being isolated and, therefore, forced to integrate faster. Does the rate of acculturation effect the eventual success, whether it is obtaining post-secondary degrees or access to the labour market? I am curious about the difference between those who are with others in cities in larger groups and those in rural areas.
Ms. Abada: When they are in a place where there is a very small proportion of people who are of the same ethnic group as them, immigrant kids are very strategic, whether they realize it or not, in the sense that they would unpack those characteristics and bury those that may not be so favourable. I think they would be forced to assimilate much faster in the sense that they would have to shed some of their ethnic characteristics just to be accepted.
That situation may be different if they were living in a larger metropolitan area. We found in our study that visible minorities living in larger metropolitan areas tended to benefit from that. It is exposure through an ethnic group. If you live among your own kind, there might very well be an advantage to that as opposed to living in a smaller town, where you are not exposed to people of the same ethnic background.
Senator Cordy: I will ask my two or three questions all in one so the chair will let me continue.
Ms. Abada, you talked in your presentation — and you just made reference to it again — about when you grow up with friends of the same ethnic background, it is positive when related to university education. For immigrant children particularly, would this be giving them a sense of community, a sense of belonging, of fitting in, all of those aspects? Would that be the driver in making them successful in continuing on to post-secondary education?
Ms. Abada: Yes; I would not say that that would be the only factor, but it certainly speaks to a much broader question. It really does reflect your parents' networks and makes you part of that community.
A study in the U.S. shows that if parents know that you are hanging out with their friends' kids, they feel much more secure. It does give you that sense of community. Given that, when the parents are within that community, they can rebuild their co-ethnic ties and pretty well share their aspirations for their kids. It speaks to a much broader question about being part of this particular community and benefiting from the strength of some of those community resources.
Senator Cordy: One thing I found interesting was when I travelled to Israel and had the opportunity to go into what I will call an ``immigration school'' — I am not sure what the real title was. It was fortunate because the whole group of immigrants was from Africa, so they were all from the same area, and they all spoke the same language.
They had a school for parents and children, where they not only taught them the language — they had language classes all day long — they also taught them cultural things. It was not to say that they had to change to the other culture, but it was just things to help them fit in — community things so that they understood simple things such as grocery shopping and preparing foods that they would find in the grocery store.
Are we doing enough similar to that to ensure that people do not just come to Canada and here they are? If they have family or friends already here, they certainly have a step up.
Ms. Abada: Some communities, whether they have support from the wider community or not, just come together. You are referring to these ethnic social institutions, in terms of the language school. This is quite large in the U.S., where parents come from across all class lines. Those who come from lower-income groups can benefit from families of high-income groups, and ask what they can do to send their kids to school.
It can be in the form of language school. In the Korean community, for example, the church is the anchor of the immigrant community. The social structures provide a place for academic enrichment and rebuilding of the social ties. It can be in the form of other associations or sports clubs.
It goes beyond just teaching them their own minority language. It goes beyond teaching them about culture, because it really is for the parents. There is this indirect benefit, so the parents can also learn from that.
In fact, a study in the U.S. shows that these ethnic language schools are not just for the kids. For instance, the parents can join seminars on how to invest in the stock market; that is an example of the purpose that these ethnic communities serve.
Senator Cordy: Mr. Sweet, I was an elementary school teacher, so I was quite taken with your comments about how much of the story is told in elementary school. We cannot suddenly get students in grade 11 and 12 and ask what they will do. It is the investments in early childhood literacy.
I was at a breakfast the other morning with the Canadian Teachers' Federation and had a lengthy discussion with the president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union on this very issue, the types of things we are hearing about in post- secondary education that say that we cannot start in high school, we have to go back.
Can you comment a little further on investing in early learning and the importance of it in post-secondary education?
Mr. Sweet: Much of the literature, argument and debate comes out of the attempt to improve the lot of low-income families. It comes out of the children in poverty programs, where we were supposed to have reduced childhood poverty by the year 2000. That was a major policy undertaking many years ago. It is one of the more durable features of the social landscape.
What has changed about that now is that the biological development in research in that area has driven down the level at which we think we ought to start. They had preschool programs that were designed to compensate. It is now evident that we need to begin much earlier than that, in infancy. The return gradients are dramatic for infant investment as opposed to investment in high school, for example. The question is how we go about doing it. We then get into the business of whether or not we have a parenting policy. What is the role of the state? If you tell people how to raise their kids, that meets a great deal of resistance.
When you begin with small children, think about immigrants or newcomers. I used to teach kindergarten. I started with that level. You did not teach math or language arts until the child was happy, settled and accepted. The whole notion of inclusion was critical for the individual, and it probably is for groups, too.
Within schools, if we look at immigrant concepts and distinguish between bonding and bridging — this has to do with your question on ethnic enclaves and school enrichment — for example, when they are 80 per cent Mandarin- speaking, should there be one or the other? Is this a problem? It turns out that you should both bond and bridge. You have a range of repertories. How you build that with little people in preschool programs or in the primary grades and on is by distinguishing between achievement and engagement, academic and social engagement. Social engagement is the extracurricular programs. They are not a frill. They are the first areas we cut. In Vancouver, they are axing the music programs now because they do not have enough money to run them.
The role of these extracurricular programs is to have the child identify with the norms and the values of the school. It is there that they begin, because they can identify with the football team or with the band or with whatever it might be and the kids with whom they are working, with the principles that underlie academic engagement — persistence, concentration, attendance, delay of gratification. That is what parents do in the link between home and school. It is a necessary loop to bring people back and build the basis for achievement.
Senator Dyck: My first question is directed to Professor Corak. You were unable to go through figure 2, comparing years of schooling for second generation sons and daughters.
Mr. Corak: That is right.
Senator Dyck: Unless I am misreading it, it looks to me as though there are big differences with a couple of countries, one being what you refer to as ``other East Asia.'' For daughters, the average years of schooling is about 14, but for sons it is about 16. In terms of policy, if we see things such as this, do we need to be concerned? Do any studies indicate why this might be so? I was surprised. I was thinking that it might be flipped and that the daughters would have a higher degree and longer years of education, based on what Senator Martin said. Quite often in school systems, at least for my generation, the boys were picked on or bullied or discriminated against much more so than the girls. It is type of a double whammy there. Is my interpretation of the graphs correct?
Mr. Corak: Two messages come out of the graphs. One is sort of a global. We should celebrate that, on average, things look great. The other is the one you noted, that in spite of how the average looks, a great deal of diversity occurs in experiences. We talked about the importance of a sense of community, culture and family. You can imagine how that heritage plays out and interacts with the Canadian reality. It would be very different across communities. It is different in the Greek community than in the Taiwanese or Jamaican community, and so on. These graphs are also meant to draw your attention to particular communities that should be the focus of attention or where the hot spots are. Your careful eye has looked at this and pointed out something that I did not notice at first look.
I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that some hot spots exist in spite of the average. I appreciate that the committee's role is to talk about access to education, but as I have repeated, we have to layer on that the experience in the labour market. The real threat that our society faces, the same as the one that France is experiencing, is a sense of achievement in education and the expectations that raises, but that is not realized in the standard of living that is acceptable. That is the group that was behind some of the riots in some of the suburbs in Paris years ago. Part of the objective of this study was to take a critical eye underneath these averages and underscore the communities in which these hot spots exist.
When we looked at it, it did not seem to us that we saw any of these communities that concerned us, when we looked at it through the lens of daughters. This is just a positive story overall. When we looked at it through the lens of sons, we saw communities in which the sons, just as their fathers, got higher than average education but in which the fathers had lower than average earnings; and they, in turn, saw their children experience the same situation.
You think of the experience of an immigrant who came here. I came here certainly for a better life for myself but in large measure for the kids. My credentials, for whatever reason, were not recognized. I accept that, but I have hopes for my children. My children, who are Canadian-born after all, succeeded in the Canadian system. They did better than average. However, the labour market blocks them, and they are earning less than average. Those communities are people who came in a previous generation from Barbados, Colombia, Granada, Guinea, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Trinidad and parts of West Africa. They have in common a certain skin colour.
That said, when we look at these generational studies, by necessity, it is backward looking. I am looking at the attainments of people once they grow up. Our challenge is to recognize where the new hot spots are and where they are coming along. We can see a bit of that, perhaps. There have been outbreaks in Montreal. That reflects not just the Haitian community but also some of the communities of Arabic background. Focusing on these new hot spots in the early years is important in recognizing them. On average, we should be proud of what we have accomplished. We stand out internationally as a positive experience. However, that is not to say that particular groups do not still have some road to travel. Part of that has to do with family background. All of these experiences, if you listened to our discussion, in a sense tell us as much about ourselves as they tell about immigrant communities. Why are credentials not being recognized, and who are the groups that are able to protect and block new entrants? Why do names and colour still matter? It is very much a two-way street.
Senator Dyck: As a follow-up to name and colour, in your estimation, is there anything that would support or suggest the idea that those factors become more exaggerated during a recession? When the economy is tight and jobs are harder to come by, could employers tend to focus on hiring who they see as familiar and the same?
Mr. Corak: There is good evidence to suggest that is the case. If we look back to the 1990s recession, which was a long recession focused in Ontario, the group that fared the worst in the early 1990s were the new immigrants. These people were shunted, because of the lack of jobs, into occupations that they would not have otherwise taken. That has a longer-term scarring effect. We are fortunate that the current recession will not be as long. However, when the queue is long at the factory, jobs are rationed, and they can be rationed according to criteria other than ability.
The Chair: Does anyone else have anything to add in response to Senator Dyck's question? I have a supplementary question from Senator Champagne.
Senator Champagne: It is a big problem for immigrants who try to have their diplomas recognized in Canada. I know of a case of a man from Morocco who did his studies in France. He is a doctor with a degree from France. He immigrated to Quebec because he thought he would have no problem with the language as he spoke French. It has been two and a half years, and he had to go back to university for one year, which made it difficult given that he has a wife and child.
Can we do anything to help facilitate that transition when people arrive and are well educated? God knows, we need family doctors. Can you suggest anything that we can do? The provinces have something to say in choosing their immigrants, but could the federal government do something to encourage better practice? I am sure many such immigrants are in that same situation of driving a cab instead of working at a family clinic. Do you have any suggestions?
Mr. Corak: I am under the impression that the federal government is moving on this file. Part of that involves information and an appreciation that degrees obtained in different universities across the world can be ranked in terms of quality and to get that information into the workplace in an effective way.
As we have discussed, part of it reflects the rigidities in our labour market and the groups that have formed around those interests to effectively block newcomers. Medicine is often talked about in this respect. I am not sure what role the federal government could have in that. It is that sort of unnecessary credential that keep groups out. I appreciate the urgency, but I am not sure that I am in a position to offer you any suggestions.
Senator Champagne: If that person could practice as a doctor, he would make money, and the children, whom he brought from Morocco and the other one who was born here, would become newcomers who would eventually go to university. It is a vicious circle, in my opinion.
Mr. Corak: I do not want to say that the intergenerational consequences of that should be overstated. Even though that parent faces those constraints, his or her children will still do well because he passes on other things that matter. In the long run, it seems to work itself out. However, that is no consolation.
It says less about that individual than it says about how our labour market is structured.
Senator Champagne: Let us hope we can help.
The Chair: One of the focuses that we have is on Aboriginal people in terms of access to post-secondary education. We have been told that Aboriginal people who graduate from high school are about as likely to go on to post- secondary education as the rest of the population. The problem is that they drop out in big numbers at the elementary or high-school levels.
I know immigrants face many challenges. However, are there any success stories that we could transpose to the Aboriginal population?
Mr. Sweet: The Aboriginal area is not mine. Studying immigrants in the metropolitan areas, increasingly organizations such as Metropolis are being forced to look at not only immigrants but also Aboriginal people.
Some parallels do exist. A recent study by the Environics Research Group, which you might have seen, paints a more optimistic picture than does some of the analysis of Aboriginal peoples done previously. One of the striking features of their survey was the high post-secondary aspirations held by Aboriginal youth. I recognize that as the vehicle for social mobility for establishing themselves. That was the key finding. Issues around access and vulnerability are important. The dropout rates in some of the ethnic groups that we have looked at in the TDSB approximate or are higher than the Aboriginal dropout rates. There is probably a large amount of commonality in institutional response for all of these groups.
The Chair: Are there more questions? If not, thank you for being part of this today. The information that you brought is most appreciated. We now stand adjourned.
(The committee adjourned.)